Hate Comments (Trigger Warning: Extreme Ableism)

You may have heard about this girl with Down syndrome covering “All of Me” by John Legend. After hearing her and scrolling through some negative comments, I commented about how we should give her credit for putting forth the effort that comes with performing a song. Having uploaded videos myself, I have also dealt with my fair share of haters. My most recent hater left two comments, one being “You bampot” and the other being “You’re dirt”. The user who left these comments is SteadfastFactNotionMaker and, after looking at his/her channel, found him/her to be part of a YouTube hate network. This person even subscribed to a channel called QuinPaperwasp, whose tagline (General Trigger Warning) is as follows:

  

For those who cannot read the image, I will transcribe it with the original punctuation:

i embitter, afflict, stress, and rigorously attach and hurt autistic people, suicidal people, and others i want to. thus, i wreck their pathetic lives and i derive a lot of joy from their suffering and struggling.

There is a line between expressing your opinions and verbally abusing others at their expense. The latter part of the tagline reminds me of the cruel dictators I studied in my history classes, which leads me to think that they fear a lack of power and influence like an autocrat would. Thus, they resort to belittling others for their pleasure. They erect walls of malice to conceal their vulnerability and, yet, in real life, they may be lonely, alienated, lacking in confidence, or experiencing hate themselves and lashing out at others via the Internet to cope with it.

I’m not much of a laissez faire type, so I wanted to draw attention to this issue. I see it, not just on YouTube (though that's the place I most see it), but on other regions of the Internet such as blogs. This is not just about censorship or language policing, but about the value and respect of mankind as a whole.